Tag Archives: Open Government Partnership

Yesterday on the White House website, Steven VanRoekel (U.S. CIO) and Aneesh Chopra (U.S. CTO) posted an announcement that the Obama administration has begun to release open source components of the Data.gov platform so that other governments may also launch their own versions of the Data.gov repository as part of the Open Government Partnership. The point of the Partnership is to improve government transparency, and currently there are 46 countries participating in the effort, and this first release is a result of the collaborative work of the United States and India on the platform.

This open source code release also presents an expanded opportunity for the Educational Positioning System (EPS) to become a truly global guide for academic decision-making. While the original EPS concept made no specific reference to scope of services, it has always been our desire to see its service area expand beyond national boundaries. As the travel realities of a global society become more widespread, the ability to share academic information across countries becomes as meaning as sharing that information across educational institutions and organizations with the United States.

The foundation for a successful EPS initiative involves data and metadata format standardization, certainly, as well as access to warehoused data in repositories such as Data.gov and the National Student Clearinghouse. Individual Learning Management System vendors will need to look to the cloud as a both the source and ultimate destination of all student-related content from transcripts to e-portfolio artifacts. Through the work of such organizations as the IMS Global Learning Consortium, we continue to build interest and momentum in “EPS 1.0” for our most basic, initial system design.